No abstract

Future support efforts should help daughters manage the caregiving role in light of other responsibilities. This can mitigate overload-related strain in valued relationships and decreased participation in valued activities, thereby contributing to better health and well-being for daughter caregivers.

What is known about this topic• Adult children are increasingly becoming caregivers to ageing parents.• Existing reviews of caregiver needs and health outcomes are disproportionately skewed towards the reports of spousal caregivers.• Adult children caregivers (ACCs) are distinct from spousal caregivers in terms of the roles they occupy and the relationship they have with the care recipient.• There is a growing body of literature that investigates the factors contributing to ACC well-being that has yet to be reviewed and appraised. What this paper adds• Factors that contribute to ACC well-being can be mapped into those that are: (i) care recipient-related; (ii) caregiver-related; and (iii) socially embedded.• The most frequently investigated factors are those that are socially embedded (i.e. parent-child relationship, multiple role involvement, social support to ACC).• Higher quality parent-child relationships are related to better well-being, but there is disagreement about how multiple role involvement contributes to well-being.• The majority of studies are cross-sectional with a paucity of longitudinal and qualitative studies. AbstractThe ageing of the population will increasingly result in reliance on the family for care in the community. Existing reviews have provided insights into the needs and health outcomes of family caregivers, but are disproportionately skewed towards spousal caregivers. Presently, a large majority of family caregivers are adult children. Adult children are distinct from spousal caregivers in terms of the combination of roles they occupy and the relationship they have with the care recipient. These unique considerations can have important implications for their wellbeing. A growing body of literature has investigated the factors that contribute to adult children caregivers' (ACCs) well-being; however, no reviews to date have synthesised this body of literature or appraised its methodological quality. Our objective was to identify the range and types of factors that contribute to ACC well-being across studies. A scoping review was conducted. Medline, Psycinfo, EMBASE and CINAHL databases (January 1996-August, 2012 were systematically searched for studies investigating ACC well-being. Inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied, methodological quality was appraised, the data were charted and a narrative synthesis was conducted. Fifty-five studies met our inclusion criteria. Factors that contribute to ACC well-being were found to be either: (i) care recipient-related (e.g. nature of limitations, amount of care required); (ii) caregiver-related (e.g. psychological dispositions of the ACC); or (iii) socially embedded (e.g. parent-child relationship, multiple role involvement, social support available to the ACC). Socially embedded factors that contribute to ACC well-being have received the most attention in the literature. Among these factors, ACC well-being is uniquely impacted by the quality of the parent-child relationship and combination of roles occupied. The majority of studies were cro...